We were dropped off at the Heart of Wilmington Motel by a taxi, which I paid for with cash. I wasn’t happy about leaving my Challenger at the Waffle Depot. If Steve put out an APB for my car, however, we’d be nabbed just like that.
After the taxi peeled out, I turned and saw the sign.
NO VACANCY.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said under my breath. There were only eleven cars in the lot, including Finn’s.
Barack slapped me on the back. “This type of motel, all we have to do is wait. Something will open up within the hour.”
I dragged my feet to the front desk. Barack wasn’t wrong, however. Within twenty minutes, a room opened up. I paid in cash. The clerk didn’t ask for ID; he didn’t even ask for a name.
The first thing I noticed when we entered our room was that one of the beds was missing. Or rather there were two beds, but only one of them had a mattress.
“Did you book the honeymoon suite?” Barack asked.
“It’s not funny,” I said. I was tired and cranky, and didn’t want to deal with a missing mattress.
“I’ll call the front desk and get it straightened out,” Barack said. “You can use the shower first.”
I hit the bathroom and undressed. Under the harsh lights, my knee looked pretty gruesome—black and blue and swollen like a bloated corpse. How was I going to explain it to Jill? The best thing would be to do what I always did: tell her the truth, and do a little old-fashioned Catholic groveling for forgiveness.
And if my knee was gruesome, my face was an absolute horror show. The circles under my eyes. The creases on my forehead. The weight of the world was on my shoulders, and finally I was starting to slump.
What was I doing? Barack might have been in his prime, but I was past mine. No matter how loudly I proclaimed onstage to anyone who would listen that I was in perfect health, I couldn’t ignore the effects of Father Time. I was starting to feel my age. It wasn’t something I would ever admit aloud to another human being, not even Jill. I wouldn’t even say a word of it to Champ. There was nothing embarrassing about getting older, but I wasn’t having it.
Had Finn been on his way to see me? Did he think I could offer him protection? What could I do that the police couldn’t? I hadn’t been able to prevent his death. I wasn’t the vice president anymore. I didn’t have any formal authority. I was just an old man. I couldn’t keep pace with the shady characters I’d encountered so far, either physically or mentally—and with my banged-up knee, I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in heck of running from them if they turned the tables and started pursuing us.
I wasn’t the same man Finn had known all those years ago. The man Finn had known was a decade younger. The man Finn had known hadn’t spent eight years fighting Tea Party maniacs hell-bent on obstructionism. Barack’s hair had gone gray; mine was already white when we started. It was madness to think I could help Finn…but I wasn’t sure I had much choice. Finn needed me. His family needed me.
But first, I needed sleep.
I flicked the light switch off and returned to the motel bedroom. I would shower in the morning.
“Everything come out okay, Joe?” Barack asked.
“Just fine,” I said. Barack liked to rib me about my age, mostly in the form of jokes. Are you getting enough fiber, Joe? How’s your prostate, Joe? That sort of thing. Barack did that to everyone, though. He liked to “joke” with his close friends and aides, when in reality he was putting all of us down. It had never really bothered me. I liked to think of myself as good-humored by nature. But today I wasn’t in the mood. I glared at Barack, warning him that he should back off or get socked.
I hadn’t socked someone in almost seventy years.
I was sort of looking forward to it.
I fell onto the bed without pulling back the bedspread. The mattress was hard and unforgiving; the pillow felt like it was filled with wet sand. While Barack showered, I picked up the TV remote and realized the room was missing a television; there were some wires and cables poking out of the wall where a TV had once been mounted.
When Barack returned, he was dressed in a T-shirt and gym shorts. Barack hadn’t let himself go to the birds—I’d already known this, having watched several of his little “adventure” videos. He was all muscle and bone. He gave new meaning to the phrase “dad bod.” I realized I was staring and quickly looked away.
“Are you going to make room for me?” Barack asked.
I inched over to one side, leaving him half the bed, which wasn’t much. My left arm dangled over the edge and touched the floor.
Barack slid in next to me. “I called the front desk, but they didn’t have a spare mattress. Unless you want to wait for another room, this is it.”
“Did they say what happened to the other one?”
“You don’t want to know,” Barack said. “You really don’t want to know.”
He turned off the bedside lamp.
We lay in the dark, side by side, each of us half off the bed, staring at the ceiling. We could hear the steady gentle thumping of a bedframe, knocking against the wall in the room next door. After a few minutes, the bedframe went silent. A woman cried out in ecstasy. Barack and I started giggling like a couple of kids.
When we caught our breath, I was too worked up to sleep.
“POTUS, SCOTUS, or FLOTUS,” I said.
Barack turned to me. “What’s that?”
“It’s a game we used to play in the Senate, while we were waiting out overnight filibusters. I name three women, and you say who you’d like as your—”
“—POTUS, SCOTUS, or FLOTUS.”
“You got it.”
“So give me the names.”
“Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton.”
There was a long pause.
“Give me three different names,” Barack said.
“Sorry, I can’t change the rules.”
“It’s a little demeaning to women. Who came up with this game, Strom Thurmond?”
“Hey now, Strom may not have been Pope Francis, but he wasn’t sexist.”
“He was racist, Joe.”
“The correct term is ‘segregationist.’”
“Oh,” Barack said, staring at the ceiling. “That’s so much better.”
“You’re avoiding the question. POTUS, SCOTUS, or FLOTUS. Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth—”
“Hillary for POTUS. Elizabeth for SCOTUS. Nancy for FLOTUS.”
I stared at him, incredulous.
“Nancy for FLOTUS? Not Elizabeth Warren? You’re insane.”
“Elizabeth Warren is the youngest of the three. That’s why I’d seat her on the Supreme Court. You know age was the primary reason they tapped Gorsuch.”
“Fine. But Hillary as POTUS? You’re joking, right?”
“Are you still bitter about the whole election?”
“I could have beat that short-fingered clown in the general, Barack, I could have—”
“Goodnight, Joe.”
I sighed. “Goodnight, Barack.”
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but couldn’t get Hillary’s face out of my head. I knew the direction the country had taken wasn’t her fault. I also knew that, if I’d run, I would be sleeping in the White House instead of the Heart of Wilmington hotel.
I cracked an eye and saw that Barack was still awake, staring at the ceiling. I finally looked up, too, and saw that he was watching a cockroach run back and forth, like a swimmer doing laps in a pool.
“You ever think about running again?” I asked him.
“For president?”
“For anything,” I said. “Senate.”
“Michelle would kill me in my sleep.”
“Be serious.”
“I am,” Barack said. “She said she’d smother me with a pillow. Even showed me which one she’d use.”
“Fine,” I said. “But you still didn’t answer me. You ever think about it? Forget if you’d actually do it. You have to think about it, sometimes.”
“I think about a lot of things,” Barack said. “I don’t like to talk about them.”
“Bad thoughts?”
“Bad thoughts, good thoughts.”
“You see a shrink?”
“You think I need to?”
I snorted.
“I’m a man, Joe,” Barack said. “Sometimes, a man has thoughts that he shouldn’t. Or, let me rephrase that: a lot of times, a man has thoughts that he shouldn’t. You can’t control your thoughts. You can only control your actions.” He paused. “You’re thinking about running, aren’t you?”
“I think about a lot of things, too. But, yeah. That’s one of them.”
“What does your heart tell you?”
“That I was put on this earth to serve, and by God that’s what I’ve done. The question is, when is it enough?”
Barack took a deep breath, then exhaled. “It’s never enough. I’d give away every dollar I have—and I practically do, some years—to fix what’s wrong with our country. To fix what’s wrong with the world.”
“But like you said, it’s never enough,” I said. “So why do we keep doing it?”
“To make a difference,” Barack said.
“And have we?
“Made a difference?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Have we made a difference?”
He closed his eyes. “I don’t know, Joe. I just don’t know.”